Mothers’ Day

A normally not-very-visible, quite different mother was very busy in our back yard today for Mothers’ Day.

The golden orb spider spent most of the morning laying eggs! If you look closely at the picture below (or click on it for the larger sized, more detailed shot) you can actually see her producing some of the silk encasing the egg sac. I love the golden yellow colour of the silk.

M first noticed that she wasn’t in her web this morning. I was sad at first because I thought she’d been eaten by a bird, but I kept looking and finally found her in the magnolia bush right next to her web, which her web is tethered to. When I first saw her, she was very intent on ejecting the silk threads to cover her eggs and was mostly motionless in the posture you see in the picture above.

I watched her for much of the morning, going back every hour or so to look at her progress. By noon she was moving around the egg sac, slowly ejecting threads of silk that she used to pull the leaves surrounding her somewhat closer to the sac.

She wasn’t moving quickly and in fact seemed clumsy and tired. I suppose that’s only natural if you’ve spent hours laying eggs and covering them up with silk you have to produce yourself. I did notice that her body, which had been plump, glossy and shiny when I saw her during the week, seemed to have shrunk, so that she looked thin. And the gloss had gone.

I finally discovered the macro setting on the camera and I think the photos turned out okay, given that it was just me trying to hold the camera steady as close to the spider as I could get without touching or disturbing her.

I have no fear of spiders at all. Imagine if that was a cockroach, I would NOT be photographing it, I would have dispatched M with a can of roach spray to kill it! There’s no logic to phobias…

The dogs wondered what I was up to, and occasionally joined me when I went up to the bush to take a look. There’s Paco trying to get my attention.

Most of the rest of the time they found it terribly boring, however and retired to their beds to contemplate the pleasures of sunshine instead.

I’m sad to say that I think the spider is dead. Late in the afternoon I found her on the wall next to the bush. She seemed very disoriented and tired, moving in jerks with one of her back legs not functioning very well. Instead of heading back to her web she went in the opposite direction, over the wall into the neighbour’s yard. I was vaguely tempted to pick her up and try to put her back in her nest, but I decided I shouldn’t interfere.

The eggs are still in their golden case. I will keep an eye on them. I wonder how long the gestation period for Nephila edulis is. Stay tuned.

There are more spider photos on Flickr, if you’re interested. Apologies if you’re not a spider fan!